Thursday, 24 January 2008

The folk at the GoingToSeminary blog have come up with a cunning and effective strategy for boosting blog traffic. (If I win the prize, I’ll donate it to a reader of F&T.)

Peter Leithart has a nice quote from Pamuk on “why we fall in love with only a few books in a lifetime.” And Brian is absolutely right to defend the importance of theological polemics: “Are not such oppositions entirely necessary, in order to demonstrate the kinds of decision (rather than syncretism) that conversion entails?”

Daniel Philpott writes about the relation between political theology and liberal democracy, noting that Mark Lilla’s argument in The Stillborn God “is driven by his own beliefs about theology as much as it is by his beliefs about the history of theology.” Fr Chris points us to a new First Things article by Avery Dulles on salvation outside the church. And Halden speaks of the pernicious domination of choice in the contemporary church: “The reality of choice, as constructed in late capitalism as the all-powerful arbiter of shaping life, must be met head-on by Christians.”